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Wednesday, 03 October 2012

Free Today: Zoner Photo Studio 14 PRO

Stephen Sienczyk passed along the news that Zoner Photo Studio 14 PRO is being given away as a free download for the next 11 hours or so. Normally $70. It's a PC-only image editor, and I know absolutely nothing about it; so this isn't a recommendation, just information; hereby passed along in case anyone might be interested. Suit yourself.

Mike(Thanks to Stephen)

Original contents copyright 2012 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.A new product of interest today:

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)Featured Comments from:

adamct: "I undertook a personal project of looking at about 30 different low-cost image editing programs a while ago. The clear winner was Photoline, which is an unbelievably powerful product and a truly viable Photoshop alternative. Importantly, you can run Photoshop plugins on 16-bit images with full color management. It is the only product I could find that had that functionality. Unfortunately, like Photoshop, it's not the easiest product to use.

"If my memory serves me well (I don't have my notes here), Zoner Photo Studio scored quite well. Whatever version I looked at was undoubtedly several versions ago, but I seem to remember thinking it was a very capable product with a good user interface. Since it is free, it is worth checking out. But if you can put together the €59 ($76) that Photoline costs, I can't recommend it highly enough. Don't let the absolutely abominable website put you off."

Comments

I may have misspoken above...I can't remember whether Photoline was the only product that supported Photoshop plug-ins on 16-bit images with full color management, or whether it was the only product that supported the above AND layers...

As long as this topic is open, does anyone know of a rudimentary photo editing program that can edit very large images? By large I mean in the 33,000 x 33,000 to 40,000 x 80,000 pixel range, or greater than 4 gigabyte file sizes
Photoshop ranges from "just barely works" to "won't even open the file" in that range.

Command line only would even be useful just to cut up big images into smaller pieces.

If we are talking about cheap and good photo editing programs, I have to go aside with adamct: I would highly recommend photoline. I use it in conjuction with Fixfoto (not layer functionality, but a highly customizeable user interface that can be adapted to ones workflow). What I especially like about Photoline is its "document" capability - I do all my printing from photoline (as it is the only "cheap" image editing software that fully supports printer profiles and allows for layout vector graphics).

For what it's worth, after the recommendations above I tried photoline and it can open tiff and photoshop psd files that are larger than what photoshop can open.
On the other hand, it seemed like the program was letting the operating system do the memory management with a lot of swapping to disk.
Better than photoshop in some arcane ways , and seems generally competent.